Palma the Younger (Jacopo Negretti)

PALMA THE YOUNGER (JACOPO NEGRETTI). - Painter, b. in Venice in 1544, d. there in 1628.

Son of the painter Antonio P. and great-grandson of Giacomo P. the Elder (v.), he learned the art from his father and was a pupil of Titian, whose last masterpiece, the Pietà (Accademia of Venice), he finished. As a young man he went to Urbino and from there to Rome, where he stayed eight years, studying Michelangelo. Having returned to Venice, he defined his pictorial style, fusing the teachings of the great Venetians of the 16th century, especially those of Tintoretto, and creating an easy and mechanical manner, aimed at superficial effects and at the monotonous repetition of conventional schemes. He thus made himself the chief person responsible for the decadence of Venetian painting of the time.

One of his earliest works is the decoration of the sacristy of S. Giacomo dell'Orto; among the best is the decoration of the oratory of the Crociferi (on which he worked for 12 years), where there are passages full of realistic spontaneity and narrative simplicity, with some excellent portraits. In the later works a rhetorical search for effects prevails, achieved with a dark chiaroscuro that only very rarely lights up with vivid and ringing tones. Many are his works for the Doge's Palace: from the Assault on Constantinople to the great ceiling with Venice crowned by Victory (Hall of the Greater Council), to the cold and conventional allegorical representations of the League of Cambrai and of the Homage of the Venetian Cities to the Dominant City, to the superficial Last Judgment in the Hall of the Scrutiny. Very numerous are his works in Venetian churches and in the Veneto, at Sansepolcro, etc.

Nolfo di Carpegna